A blog by Mike aka Thog. I write. I game. I've never eaten a starfish.

Tuesday, 18 November 2008

Yawnipops! (From Thog's Blog 18/11/2008)

ooo I'm tired today. First day back at work since last Friday lunchtime meant that I had 36 emails waiting for me, and by the time I narrowed them down to the half a dozen that I had to deal with there was another 7 awaiting me!

For anyone who doesn't know (and probably doesn't care!), I work for the local council in Construction Management. Roughly, when you want something building (a school, a road, a hospital, that kind of thing) you can't just ring up a building company and say "I want a school - go build me one!" - you need to tell them where you want it, how many kids you want to fit in the school, you need to ensure you've got the best company doing the work for the price you're paying out, and that on the opening day of the school it's all finished. I work in a team which helps the council do all of these sorts of things. It tends to be a job with one or two really important things that I have to keep an eye on to make sure nothing is going wrong, loads of urgent things that can be dealt with quickly (if I'm lucky) and masses of things that I ought to do but are less urgent than the rest. I do love getting all these different things done, it's just sometimes it's a bit of a shock to the system when you've had a few days off, especially when all you've done in those days off is focus on one thing (WoW) and then suddenly at work you've got to juggle half a dozen different tasks at the same time.

Anyway - work's over until the morning, and tonight will be taken up with two things: Ironing and Slimming.

Ironing is basically the one household chore which is mine, Denkai just about does everything else so I really ought to do this one. That didn't stop me this morning putting on a purple and black striped shirt for work because I had no other ironed shirts to wear, but it is my chore to do so I need to get it done.

Slimming is a long battle of mine to get down to a reasonable weight. Every Tuesday night I get weighed to see how I've done. The last 3 weeks I've got 6 pounds off (about 2.7 kilos?) but I've not done very well this last week so I'm wondering if I might have actually put weight on this week.

Anyhow, I'm going to write now a little bit about WoW, and my topic for tonight is mods.

I sometimes forget on guild channel that when I go on about mods, some players don't use them, maybe don't even know what they are.

What mods are is an addon to WoW that enhance the game in some way, helping the player. Here are some of the common mods:

Cartographer - gives a full map of all of the areas in World of Warcraft, and adds a co-ordinate system so that you can specify exactly where something is.

QuestHelper - puts an arrow on the minimap showing where you need to go to do your next quest.

Auctioneer - tells you how much items are worth so you know how much to auction it for.

Omen - a threat meter. It shows who in the party is pulling aggro on a mob, so that a tank knows if they are holding enough aggro, or if a DPS is causing too much threat they hold to hold back so they don't pull a mob off the tank.

Deadly Boss Mods - a mod that gives useful information about bosses and timings on battlegrounds, difficult to describe but very very useful.

GroupCalendar - an essential one for Ravenswing guildies, guild events are tracked on this mod. You can see what events are planned and sign up to them in-game.

If you want to get any mods, www.curse.com is a good place to try. Curse has a program called CurseClient which easily installs and updates mods so it makes things a lot easier.

I would warn that sometime mods can mess up your WoW interface. I've often had problems with Cartographer and Auctioneer, although the latter I've resolved by using a different mod called Auction Master. That said, for raiding there are 3 essential mods - Omen (so you know that your aggro is okay), Deadly Boss Mods (tells you when bosses are casting spells), and GroupCalendar (so you can sign up for the raid in the first place!), without them raiding is a no-no.

I guess I'm going to sign off for now, it's been a busy day and I just want a little bit of a chill out before I crack on with the ironing. If I've got on well with my chores tonight tomorrow night I can get levelling again!